Herb: Jeff, you’re the founder of Tower of Light Ministries. How long have you been doing your ministry?
Jeff: I’ve been leading it for about ten years.
Herb: How did the Lord lead you to start your ministry?
Jeff: Tower of Light Ministries helps people who have same sex attractions to give them the help and support they need. So part of that comes out of my own story of having struggled with same sex attraction and eventually being able to find some help and support. And the organization I went to for help was leaving Seattle, so that is when I stepped into ministry, since there needed to be somebody to take their place.
Herb: Over the last ten years, how have same sex attraction ministries fared in the Pacific Northwest? Are they thriving? Are they struggling?
Jeff: Well, there are very few. My own ministry has grown over the years. The culture has definitely changed. But there are still Christians out there who feel convicted that giving in to these attractions isn’t God’s will for their life, and that hasn’t changed. And so as word gets out that my ministry is here, more and more people come for help.
Herb: When someone comes to you for help with same sex attraction, what type of process do you use?
Jeff: Well, often when people come for help, they want to know if it”s going to be six months or a year until they’re a raging heterosexual and they don’t have another same sex thought. Often, because they have so much shame around these attractions, they don’t feel that God can love them with these attractions or they can love themselves.
So I always try to re-frame the goal away from heterosexuality and to holiness. I think holiness is the goal for everything we struggle with. Holiness is the goal for my pride issues, my materialism issues and my sexual issues. If the goal is heterosexuality and they don’t get it in the time frame they think, they can become bitter towards God and go into a gay lifestyle. If the goal is holiness, that’s the goal we can have until the day we die.
So I focus in helping them initially get their life where they’re walking in holiness. If they’re involved in activity that’s against their walk with God, let’s get their behavior where it’s manageable. And then once they do that, then we can begin working on some root issues that drive that attraction, helping them get healthy same sex relationships, a healthy sense of their identity as a man or a woman, etc.
So as they do that, very often the intensity of those same sex attractions over time lessen, the frequency can lessen. And if it happens, praise God, that’s great. But there’s no shame in the process and they’re walking with God in holiness.
Maybe over time, as they become more solid in who they are as a man or a woman in same sex friendships, then we can explore issues with the opposite gender. Because people with same sex attractions also have issues with the opposite gender. And we can explore heterosexuality. I don’t promise heterosexual attraction to anyone. I know that God wants them to walk in holiness and get support in doing that. I’m here to help them work on their root issues and help them walk in that process and see where God takes that.
So, when people talk about change, I’m very careful not to imply that change means they’re changing to be 100% heterosexual. But everyone does experience change. The person who is acting out in behaviors that are against his walk with God, and now no longer is, that’s change.
Herb: What about someone who has a relative, maybe a child, who expresses same sex attraction, how would you advise our counsel parents.
Jeff: I would advise them to contact me. Probably half the people I meet with are parents who have a child who just announced that they’re gay and they’re going into a gay lifestyle. These parents need support because very often they’re isolated. They haven’t told their friends, their church. They don’t have people rallying around them to help them. They’re grieving the decision they’re child is making. So they need help and support.
So, generally speaking, I advise parents to sit down with their child and have a good discussion based on Scripture. They should explain to them the Biblical viewpoint and that they will always, always, always see homosexual activity as sin and not God’s will for their life. However, they need to also explain that their child is still their family member and they will always love them and nothing they’re going to do is going to stop them from loving him or her. They should tell their child that they should not mistake their love for him or her as meaning that they have changed their mind on this topic or that they are accepting their behavior as okay.
This then allows them to table the Scripture. Because if they continue to hit them with Scripture every time they get together, it will drive them away. But it also allows them to be able to freely love their child without that love being mistaken as meaning that you approve.
Herb: What about some of the practical issues. Let’s say your adult child brings over their partner and they want to spend the night. How does a parent respond to something like that?
Jeff: There are a couple of different ways to look at it. One is what would you do in this case heterosexually if your son wanted to bring his girlfriend over and spend the night together? What would you do in that case? If you’re treating them differently, then you have a hierarchy of sin going. Heterosexual sin isn’t holier or less holy than homosexual sin.
Another way to look at it is to ask oneself if you can do this in good conscience without causing me to sin or causing someone else to sin. If it’s going to cause someone else to sin, I cannot in good conscience do it.
Now, if they want to bring their person over for Thanksgiving dinner, it’s not necessarily a conscience/sin issue. But there’s also the comfort factor. If you’re so uncomfortable with them bringing their partner over for Thanksgiving that you sob all the way through the meal, you are not helping your relationship with your child at all. So you can say, “I’m very uncomfortable with this. I know this person is very important to you. But I’m still trying to adjust to this. Can I maybe meet your partner at Starbucks first?”
Herb: On a broader perspective, do you feel that the Christian community is responding well to the changes that are happening in our culture regarding same sex marriage and issues around it?
Jeff: I think there’s an increasing tendency in our culture to pendulum swing. Historically, the church has had a lot of truth and very little love towards the gay community. And now we feel very guilty about that. So there’s a tendency to swing the other way to where we have lots of love and no truth. And there’s a whole movement now that tries to reinterpret Scripture to justify homosexual behavior as being God approved. So there’s the whole kind of gay Christian theology that’s going through churches. It’s not true. It takes the opposite posture towards Scripture that I think we should have.
My view as a Christian is, regarding all my urges and desires, I go to Scripture and ask what God says about them and then I surrender those desires to Him. But gay Christian theology takes the opposite approach. It is, generally, “I am committed to engaging in this behavior. How can I reinterpret and discount Scripture to justify what it is I’m committed to doing?” And then the rest of the church has just bought into it.
So they’ll say that over the last 4,000 years we’ve misinterpreted Scripture. And the reality is we haven’t misinterpreted Scripture for the last 4,000 years. It still means the same thing it always has. But churches have guilt over not having loved the gay community in the past, or they don’t want to be seen as haters, or politically incorrect. And so it’s very tempting to compromise.
Herb: Some people say that gay people are born that way, that’s it’s genetic. How should we respond to that argument?
Jeff: I teach a whole hour on that topic. I don’t personally believe that it’s genetic. There’s absolutely no evidence of it actually being genetic. But next week, if they came out with a gay gene, it wouldn’t affect my viewpoint. Because, again, my viewpoint is, regardless of how we got our issues and our desires and our urges, we go to Scripture and we ask God what He says about our particular desires. And we have to surrender our desires to Scripture.
So, regardless of how it came out in my life, I have to surrender my urges and desires – my ?broken genetics – to Scripture.
Herb: The way I think of it is that heterosexual people have urges that are not in accordance with Scripture as well. They are not necessarily programmed to be monogamous, but Scripture calls us to be monogamous.
Jeff: My friends would tell me that they are biologically created to have sex with thousands of women. But they have to surrender to God and walk in holiness with their wife.
Herb: So it’s a similar struggle.
Jeff: Similar, but people in the gay community will respond that you do have a legitimate outlet for your sexual desires while they have none for theirs. How can a loving God ask me to be alone and miserable and never have a partner?
Herb: And how do you respond to that?
Jeff: My response to that is that many people who do have same sex attractions have actually experienced a change in their attractions and are now married, but a lot of people still do not. In America, we are a very entitled culture. We are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, to a great job, to a family, to fulfillment, to sexual activity with my spouse. We are a very entitled culture. My viewpoint is that, as Christians, there is only one thing that we are entitled to, and that is hell. And thank God that we are not getting what we are entitled to. Jesus came and died so that I would not get what I’m entitled to. We say that we’re following Jesus, that he’s our Lord. And yet, when we look at this person that we say that we’re following, he was penniless, he was homeless, he was unpopular, he was flogged, he was martyred. And this is the person that I say that I’m modeling my life after. My viewpoint is that if I get anything more than my savior got, I should be falling on my face in gratitude.
I believe that God does want to bring some healing into a lot of broken areas of our lives, but a lot of people I know will continue to have same sex attractions and it is part of that cross that we carry. Jesus promises us that we are going to have a cross that we carry daily. It is the last thing that we, as an entitled culture, want to hear. And for some people, this is part of the cross that they’re carrying. It doesn’t mean that we have to live a horribly empty, unfulfilled life. I’m single and I have a lot of friendships. I can be as social as I want to be. I can be involved in ministry and travel and do things I wouldn’t be able to do if I was married. I have the best job on the planet.
Herb: Jeff, thank you so much for the time. Praise the Lord for your ministry.